Update: It’s now official.
Building on a report from Billboard last week, Re/code now says that starting on Christmas Eve, The Beatles will be available on Apple Music. The report from last week said that the hit British boy band’s catalog would launch on one streaming service on December 24, but left out specifics.
When Apple Music launched back in June, it was noted that the music subscription service didn’t offer up the entire iTunes catalog with a few big name artists missing including The Beatles. That could be about to change, according to a new report out of Billboard, which cites sources that claim The Beatles music will be available for streaming for the first time next week. While the report believes The Beatles music will start streaming on Christmas Eve, what isn’t clear is which streaming service will have access first …
Today Apple’s iTunes Store is getting some exclusive content from The Beatles with the “1+” collection consisting of 50 restored videos.
The videos are a mix of promotional and music videos that the group released over the years together with some new audio and video commentary from Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr. You’ll also find a 124-page illustrated book with information accompanying the videos.
The press release notes that the videos have been completely remastered with new stereo and 5.1 Dolby Digital surround audio mixes, while the video itself was taken from 35mm negatives scanned in 4K and digitally restored.
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Contrary to many assumptions being posted this morning, Apple Music doesn’t allow you to stream the entire iTunes library – just most of it. As The Verge notes, The Beatles are among the exceptions.
Even Beats Music got this wrong, stating in its FAQ that Apple Music gives you everything you get with Beats “plus, you can play all of the songs in the iTunes catalog” …
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Image: Forbes
When Apple enters a new business, you know it’s not going to do so in a half-hearted, small way. When it launches its Apple-branded Beats Music service later this year, it’s a no-brainer to predict that it’s going to be a big deal for the music industry. With Apple’s deep integration of Beats into its existing iOS/iTunes ecosystem exclusively revealed by Mark Gurman added into the mix, I wonder whether the unique selling points being notched up by Apple could be enough to leave existing big-name players like Spotify, Google Play and Rdio dead in the water?
That’s rather a grand idea, of course. As of last month, Spotify reached 15 million paid subscribers–up 50% in the last six months alone. Beats Music had only a little over 100,000 subscribers at the time Apple bought the company, and is rumored to have only 2-3 times as many now. But an Apple-ified Beats Music service has four things going for it …
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With only days remaining until iOS 7 is released into the hands of consumers worldwide, Apple has finally managed to bring The Beatles to iTunes Radio.
Since its initial introduction at WWDC in June, users of iTunes Radio would be greeted with an absence of Beatles music, even when creating a specific “Beatles Radio” station. No explanation was given from Apple. Perhaps what’s most interesting here is that from the launch of the iTunes Music Store in 2003 until late 2010, Apple struggled to reach an agreement with Apple Corps to get The Beatles onto the store. This was due to a long series of legal battles with Apple Corps and Apple Inc, stretching back multiple decades. Until this past weekend, it appeared that The Beatles wouldn’t make it onto iTunes Radio either.
Wenner Media, best known for its music and politics biweekly Rolling Stone, will roll out digital replicas of both the Rolling Stone and US Weekly magazines for Apple’s iPad by early 2012. Digital versions of their dead tree counterparts will allegedly shy away from bells’n’whistles. In addition, the publisher will release the Beatles book app for iPad this coming Thursday, December 1.
A companion to the The Beatles: The Ultimate Album-by-Album Guide book that came out this summer, the app basically repurposes print content and sports much of the material from the Beatles’ book, MocoNews.net reports. This includes 122 pages with over 60 photos, enriched with 30-second previews of each song and interviews. The Beatles app will set you back ten bucks and will not initially launch on Android. And while we’re at the Beatles, it appears as part of the Apple Records settlement Yoko Ono got to copy Apple’s website look and feel.
Interestingly, it wasn’t that long ago that Jann Wenner, the co-founder of Wenner Media, dissed digital magazines as a fad. In a May AdAge interview, Wenner called out other publishers for scrambling to release tablet apps, painting the trend as “sheer insanity and insecurity and fear”. Perhaps the success of iOS 5 Newsstand prompted him to reconsider his stance? Last year, Wenner also organized a protest of sorts by running the magazine industry ad campaign that had promoted the “power of print”.
In a somewhat related app news, TED’s official app is finally available on the iPhone.
